When Conservative Magazines Make Stuff Up

The American Spectator's online column The Prowler has a hot new scoop. According to the anonymous author of the column:

For all of the posturing by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee during the testimony of former Department of Justice political appointee Monica Goodling, they and their Democrat colleagues in the Clinton administration went to far greater lengths to identify and track the political activities of career and politically appointed lawyers in the Department of Justice and elsewhere."

We knew the political affiliation of every lawyer and political appointee we hired at the Department of Justice from January 1993 to the end of the Administration," says a former Clinton Department of Justice political appointee. "We kept charts and used them when it came time for new U.S. Attorney nominations, detailee assignments, and other hiring decisions. If you didn't vote Democrat, you weren't going anywhere with us. It was that simple."

In fact, according to this source, at least 25 career DOJ lawyers who were identified as Republicans were shifted away from jobs in offices they held prior to January 1993 and were given new "assignments" which were deemed "noncritical" or "nonpolitically influential." When these jobs shifts came to light in 1993, neither the House nor Senate Judiciary committees chose to pursue an investigation."

The difference between then and now, is that they [Department of Justice] didn't coordinate so openly with the White House," says a former Clinton White House staffer. "Remember, we had our own separate database that we could cross check if we had names. Everybody today forgets about the databases we created inside the White House. It's funny no one talks about that anymore. We were doing stuff far more aggressively than this White House or the Department of Justice did."

Yep, you can take that to the bank, folks. An anonymous former Clinton Justice Department official told the anonymous author of a column in a right-wing rag that the Clinton administration was way worse than the Bush administration when it comes to politicization of the DOJ.

Let's be blunt here. There is no reason for any rational person to believe that a single word of this story is true. First of all, why would a former Clinton administration official be dishing such a hot scoop to some C-list wingnut at the American Spectator? Second, why would that official be giving quotes that sound exactly like the kind of quotes a Republican political operative would make up if given the chance? Third, are we really supposed to believe that it was known to Congress that the Clinton administration was violating the law in making personnel decisions at the DOJ (as Monica Goodling has admitted occurred in Bush's Justice Department) and that Congress chose not to pursue an investigation? That's laughable.

The Republican Congress investigated everything in the 1990s--from the Socks the Cat Fan Club to the way personnel decisions were handled in the travel office. There was no allegation too trivial to warrant subpoenas and a public hearing. And they ended up impeaching Clinton over his testimony about an immaterial fact in a frivolous civil lawsuit. Yet we're suppose to believe that these same salivating scandal-mongers chose not to pursue evidence of genuine illegal activities in the Clinton Justice Department? That's so astoundingly absurd that I don't even know where to begin.

Moreover, this isn't the first time The Prowler has featured too-good-to-be-true quotes from anonymous Democratic sources. Check out this October 2006 column, which was published right at the time Republicans were attempting to push back against the escalating Mark Foley scandal. That column quoted a "political consultant with ties to the DNC" as saying:

"I'm hearing the Foley story wasn't supposed to drop until about ten days out of the election. It was supposed to be the coup de grace, not the first shot."

The column then quoted a second "DNC operative":

"But by mid-September, Republicans were back to having held seats for a 15-seat majority. In the Senate, it looked like a wash. We held seats in Florida, Nebraska, picked up seats in Pennsylvania, but that that was about it. They were holding in Missouri and possibly within reach of Maryland and Washington. We were looking at a disaster in the making."

So how to remedy? "You pull out the bright shiny things that distract the average American voter away from the issues we all know they care about -- national security, anti-terrorism -- and focus on the ugly: Foley and Iraq."

At the time, I noted that this was the worst fake quote I'd ever seen. As if a Democratic operative would say that the Democratic election plan was to "distract the average American voter away from the issues we all know they care about." Please, if you're going to make stuff up, it's generally not a good idea to use phrases that the person you're quoting would never have used in a million years. The rest of the column is good for a laugh, too, given how astoundingly wrong it was about everything.

My strong suspicion is that the folks at the American Spectator are just making up quotes and attributing them to anonymous sources. Yet, as is typical with right-wing blogs, this "report" is being linked to as if it were credible. Indeed, Ed Morrissey and Rick Moran show no signs of harboring even the slightest doubt as to the story's veracity. If it's politically convenient, it must be true!

At some point, perhaps someone out there will notice this rather fundamental difference between the right and left-wing blogosphere. Sure, there are kooky leftist sites out there that make stuff up, but they tend to be taken with a grain of salt by the major left-leaning blogs when they offer up some "exclusive" story that seems too good to be true. But when the Washington Times or American Spectator or some similar rag publishes one of these stories, the major right wing blogs all immediately take the story at face value and link to it approvingly. When the story is inevitably proven to be false or at least far less than advertised, these bloggers will occasionally offer some sort of belated acknowledgement that they were wrong. But when the next too-good-to-be-true story comes along, they immediately take the bait, like Charlie Brown running to kick the football out of Lucy's hands. They never reach the obvious conclusion, that these right-wing rags have no credibility, that their stories are routinely and intentionally misleading and inaccurate.

(h/t Charles)